EQUALITY

EQUALITY

Tuesday, January 31, 2017

Op-Ed Trump's cruel, illegal refugee executive order


Protesters demonstrate against the Trump administration's refugee and immigration orders at John F. Kennedy International Airport on Jan. 28 in New York City. (Stephanie Keith / Getty Images)
Erwin Chemerinsky
The new refugee policy announced by President Trump on Friday is unconstitutional and inhumane. It is also completely unnecessary.
Trump’s executive order suspends the entry of refugees into the United States for 120 days. The order also indefinitely stops the admission of Syrian refugees and for 90 days bars individuals from seven predominantly Muslim countries:  Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen. Possibly due to poor drafting, the Department of Homeland Security said the order applies to green card holders reentering the United States. It has already resulted in chaos as travelers have been kept off flights to the United States or stranded at airports.

On Saturday night, a federal judge in New York issued a temporary stay, allowing green card or visa holders detained at airports to enter the country. The judge declared that the challengers have a “strong likelihood” of prevailing in showing that Trump’s order violates due process and equal protection.
To start, it’s illegal to bar individuals from entering the country based on nationality. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 explicitly says that no person can be “discriminated against in the issuance of an immigrant visa because of the person’s race, sex, nationality, place of birth or place of residence.” This act was adopted to eliminate the prior practice of immigration quotas from specific countries. Indeed, in signing the legislation, President Lyndon Johnson said that “the harsh injustice” of the national-origins quota system had been “abolished.”